“Projects: Marlon Mullen” through April 20, 2025
Museum of Modern Art | 11 West 53rd
Studiously enlarged renderings of art magazines become strangely lyrical, sumptuously flat compositions. Barcodes and stripes of text—freed from their prosaic functions—appear as surprising rhythmic moments in fields of thickly applied acrylic color. In Marlon Mullen’s first major institutional solo exhibition, on view in the Museum of Modern Art’s lobby-level Projects gallery, 25 canvases from the past 10 years vibrate with his signature appeal. Though the paintings are varied, unpredictably translated from their sources, radically modified according to no discernible formula, Mullen’s unfailing, inimitable style is instantly recognizable.
In anticipation of the show, the California painter visited the museum last year, spending hours in the collection galleries. After, MoMA sent him more than two dozen of its publications; the books joined Mullen’s archive of material at the NIAD Art Center, the progressive studio for artists with developmental disabilities that has been his creative base for some four decades. (The organization's acronym stands for "Nurturing Independence through Artistic Development.") But, for the most part, Mullen has preferred to work from the covers of periodicals. Artforum, with its square format and blocky typographical logo, seems to lend itself particularly well to the artist’s interpretations.
